Technology | Media | Telecommunications

Monday, March 17, 2008

ComScore released the results of a study using its comScore Segment Metrix tool, which showed that heavy users of U.S. blog sites -- heavy bloggers -- are significantly more likely than the average Internet user to consume news and entertainment content online.

"As blogs continue to grow in both quality and audience size, both traditional and non-traditional advertisers are increasingly putting their online ad dollars towards reaching this group of consumers," said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore. "This highly informed, tech savvy, and entertainment-oriented consumer segment is consistent with the profile of an influencer, which is of course a particularly attractive audience to reach."

For purposes of this study, heavy bloggers are defined as the heaviest 20 percent of blog visitors who account for 84 percent of all the time spent on blogging sites. Given that blogs can often be described as both informative and entertaining, it is not surprising that heavy users of blog sites are more likely than the average Internet user to consume news and entertainment content online.

They are significantly more likely to consume content at politics and general news sites, and also consume a disproportionate amount of content on entertainment news, humor, movies and photo-sharing sites.

Consistent with the site category findings, heavy bloggers are heavy consumers of content from several individual news and entertainment sites.

Heavy bloggers consumed more than three times as much content on social news ranking site Digg.com as the average Internet user, and also exhibited well above average consumption of content at other news sites, including CTVGlobeMedia, DrudgeReport.com, HuffingtonPost.com, Salon.com and ABC News Digital.